The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

  I am not certain what I expected the school to look like. It was a very attractive and simply constructed white frame building. It looked more like a house than a school. The trees around the purlieus of the schoolyard were massive, imposing guardians whose mass added security or mystery (depending on the looker’s point of view), to a scene rapidly becoming uncommon in the American South. Bennington gestured to a house on our right, across from the schoolhouse, and said conspiratorially, “Iris Glover lives there. She has been teaching for thirty-nine years on this island. The people are scared to death of her. She’s the island witch doctor. She’s liable to put a spell on you if you take the job.”

  “I thought she quit the job. I didn’t know I’d be taking anyone’s place,” I answered.

  “Oh, she’s retiring. At least the county is retiring her. She’s passed the mandatory age. Should have been fired forty years ago.”

  Miss Glover’s house was immaculately white with bright blue trim on her shutters and door. The blue paint was the universal symbol of recognition of the voodoo people. The paint discouraged demons and spirits from entering a house. Blue paint was to the voodoo people what garlic was to the villagers of Transylvania or what holy water was to the early Christians. The voodoo was a leftover from the African culture of the island blacks. Its modern form is much diluted and infected by Christianity but still has sincere adherents among some blacks in the lowcountry. Without being aware of it, I subconsciously identified Miss Glover as being a prime enemy on the island. This proved to be a false impression.

  Bennington glowed like a Christmas bulb when he spoke of the other teacher. She was his personal discovery. He had championed her arrival on the island. Mrs. Brown appeared at the door of the schoolhouse and welcomed us to Yamacraw Elementary School. A large woman, she had great pendulous bosoms and huge sinewy arms and a handsome, expressive face. She was light-skinned and laughed a great deal. Everything about her seemed exaggerated and blown out of proportion. She treated Mr. Bennington like a nun would treat a visiting bishop. Mrs. Brown greeted me cordially and welcomed me “overseas.” She told me, “Things are tough overseas, Mr. Conroy. I’m a missionary over here helping these poor people. Only Jesus and I know how much they need help …” She spoke without a dialect and obviously was not from the island. When I asked her about this, she confided that she was from Georgia but was educated in a very fine private school where the cruder forms of black dialects were frowned upon by the Presbyterian educators who presided over the school. She was not from the island, she assured me. She had come to the island at the insistence of Mr. Bennington.

  “Mr. Bennington is the only one who understands the problems of Yamacraw Island. He knows what’s wrong,” she said, “and he knows what to do about them.” She spoke in rhythms. Her speech was exaggerated, going up and down like a piano scale. It almost scanned conversations in iambic pentameter; the words rolled off her tongue in poems.

  I tried to talk to some of the children, but they simply gazed at me with shy amusement, then buried their faces in their hands. The children were subdued, passive, and exceedingly polite. They had risen in unison when we walked into the room. They chanted “good morning” on cue from Mrs. Brown. They folded their hands and sat up straight at their desks. In an effort to achieve the common touch, Bennington walked among the children and cracked a few jokes. They looked at Mrs. Brown, saw that she was laughing, then laughed like hell themselves. Bennington then put his hand on one small boy’s head and whispered something in his ear. The boy smiled. Bennington was a fish in water.

  It was a yes-sir, no-sir world I had entered. Math and spelling papers hung from the bulletin boards. Everything was Mickey-Mouse neat and virgin clean in the classroom. A map of the world, contributed by a Savannah bank, hung on one wall. Near it was a poster which read: EDUCATION IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS. A picture of a large key drove the point home. On Mrs. Brown’s desk was an item that caught and held my eye. It was a leather strap, smooth and very thick. It lay beneath a reading book.

  The relationship between Brown and Bennington intrigued me. Bennington represented a dying part of the South: the venerable, hoary-maned administrator who tended his district with the same care and paternalism the master once rendered to his plantation. As I watched him perform his classroom routine, I also observed Mrs. Brown’s reaction, a black teacher who nodded her head in agreement every time he opened his mouth to utter some memorable profundity. I could not tell if this was a role she was playing or if she actually believed that Bennington was the word made flesh. Anyway, they went well together. Both of them hated Miss Glover. For some undisclosed reason, Miss Glover was not at school on that day. Bennington and Brown cornered me and proceeded to blame the educational inadequacies of the children on Miss Glover.

  “She had been here forty years and the children didn’t even know how to use a fork,” said Mrs. Brown.

  “Well, Ruth,” Bennington intoned slowly, “that’s why I sent you out here. I knew you could lift these people up.”

  “I try, Mr. Bennington. You know I try. But these people don’t want to better themselves. Why, Mr. Conroy,” she said, turning to me, “the parents stay likkered up down there at the club and take the children with them when they do it. Satan smiles at all the sinnin’ going on at that club.”

  We soon departed. On the trip back I tried to gather my impressions together and come out with a final decision about teaching on the island. Andy handed out encomiums to several productive fishing holes we passed and indicated an osprey’s nest on top of a utility pole. Bennington talked about farming. I sat in the back of the boat and decided once and for all to take the job. Yamacraw was a universe of its own. The lushness of the island pleased me and the remarkable isolation of the school appealed to the do-gooder in me. Only a thoroughbred do-gooder can appreciate the feeling, the roseate, dawnlike, and nauseating glow that enveloped me on the return trip that day. I had found a place to absorb my wildest do-gooding tendency. Unhappy do-gooders populate the world because they have not found a Yamacraw all their own. All my apprehensive feelings disappeared. I had made a decision. The last statement I remember that day came from Mr. Bennington.

  “Did you notice how well I got along with those children?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “I’ve always been able to get along with colored people. They’ve always loved me.”

  My first night on Yamacraw Island was spent in a sleeping bag on the schoolroom floor. The forest outside the perimeter of the schoolyard was insane with insect voices and the dark seemed darker than any place I had been before. No streetlamps, no traffic lights, no squeal of brakes, nor any other evidence of city life presented itself that night. Darkness in strange places is always fearful and, lying on the floor that night, sweating from the armpits to the metatarsals from the heat, I felt the fear that comes from being alone in a new environment. When I did get to sleep, I was later awakened by a thunderstorm. Lightning flashed around the island; thunder played its favorite game of scaring the crap out of all the shivering mortals on the earth below. Overall, the night seemed to augur strange things.

  But the morning was a time of renewal. The first morning was incredibly bright and tranquil. I awoke, shaved without a mirror, lost several pints of blood, and awaited the arrival of Mrs. Brown and the school bus. Mrs. Brown came first.

  “Welcome overseas,” she greeted me.

  “Thank you, ma’am. It is great to be here.”

  “Ho, ho, ho. Don’t speak too quick. You are in a snake pit, son. And them snakes are gonna start snappin’ at your toes. You’re overseas now.”

  She then delivered a rather ferocious homily about the handling of colored children by a teacher so obviously white.

  “You’ve got to treat them stern. Tough, you know. You got the older babies. Grades five through eight. Keep them busy with work all the time or they’ll run you right out of that there door,” she said. “I know colored people better than you do. Tha
t’s because I am one myself. You have to keep your foot on them all the time. Step on them. Step on them every day and keep steppin’ on them when they gets out of line. If you have any trouble, Mama Brown will be right next door. We got lots of trees outside, and every tree gets lots of switches. I got some in that cabinet right over there.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  The kids arrived at 8 A.M. and swarmed into the class, each of them pausing to murmur a dutiful good-morning. One small fry climbed into a seat only to be accosted by a larger girl who said that he was sitting in her seat. He said something unintelligible (to me). She cuffed his head, he swung a fist, then she drifted into another seat while I watched the whole scene. I think I said something profound like “now, now.” After this everyone sat erect in his seat appraising me with indirect glances, looking around at one another, then giggling and looking back at me. I felt ludicrously white.

  I gave them a little pep talk—one of the rah-rah varieties that is a universal choice of teachers all over the world on the first day of school. It was dull, rambling, and full of those go-go-get-’em-get-’em epigrams concerning the critical need for every human being to live up to his highest potential and to squeeze every possible morsel of knowledge from the textbook. They expected it and nodded their heads in solemn, collective assent.

  Not one of them knew my name, but all of them had prior knowledge that a white teacher would preside over them for the year. I printed my name PAT CONROY on the board. I then said my name aloud. When I said “Conroy” they laughed like hell. Since I saw nothing intrinsically humorous in my last name, I asked them what was so damn funny. This seemed to increase their laughter by several octaves. Several of the kids were trying to pronounce my name. One girl got “Mr. Corning” out of it, and this was the nearest approximation I heard.

  Mama Brown ended my ruminations over the last-name syndrome by trooping her first-through-fourth graders in for the first-day assembly. They marched in single file like a well-drilled squad of soldiers. When all were in their seats, Mama Brown delivered the memorable opening-day address.

  “Good morning, babies.”

  A few hesitant good-mornings answered her.

  “Well, now, babies, that isn’t much of an answer for the first day of school. Let’s try it again. Good morning, babies.”

  “Good morning” came the still timorous reply.

  “Now, babies, I know your voices didn’t dry up like ole fruit over the summertime. Let’s use them vocal chords. Let me hear you say good morning like you mean it.”

  “Good morning!” they shouted loudly. The revival of the educational spirit buried in the inertia of summer had begun, at least for Mama Brown. She took a solid position behind the podium, which was placed somewhat pretentiously in the front of the room for the occasion. She then opened up with a fire-and-brimstone judgment-day sermon like an old circuit preacher who knew well the wrath of an angry God. She exhorted the kids to study hard and keep quiet or face the possibility of incurring the disfavor of the teacher who ruled them.

  “Most of you are slow,” she said. “All of us know that. But there are two of you, Frank and Mary, who could take a test right now and move up a grade or two. That’s because you got good brains and use them. The rest of you can’t think as good. We know that and you know that. Your brains are just slow. But you can learn if you work. You are just lazy, lazy, and lazy people just can’t get ahead in life. Of course some of you are even retarded, and that is even worse than being lazy. But we know you can’t help being retarded. That just means you have to work even harder than the lazy ones. Now those of you who are retarded know who you are. I don’t have to tell you. But retarded people need to be pushed and whipped harder than anyone.”

  Here she paused and eyeballed the entire congregation. She then turned to me with an ingratiating smile. “I now have the privilege of introducing Mr. Patroy to the class. Mr. Patroy will be our new principal this year. He will teach the upper grades in the basics of language communication and the new math. Mr. Patroy is so good to come over here this year and we are thankful that the Lord brought Mr. Patroy to us. Now I am going to let Mr. Patroy speak to us. Now I am going to let Mr. Patroy get the floor and tell you babies what he has planned.”

  I walked up to the podium and gave a brief self-conscious talk about the joys of scholarship, then quickly relinquished the speaker’s platform back to Mrs. Brown.

  Mrs. Brown turned solemn. “We are now going to recite the Lord’s Prayer,” she said. “Now the Soo-preme Court said we couldn’t pray on Yamacraw, but I feel if the Lord ain’t on our side, then who is. If the Lord ain’t with us, then who’s gonna be for us. If the Lord decides to forget us, then there ain’t much use in livin’. Don’t you agree, Mr. Patroy?”

  Mr. Patroy nodded his head in solemn agreement.

  We said the Lord’s Prayer, vilified the Soo-preme Court once more, then broke up the meeting.

  After the room had cleared of the underclasses, I put Plan Number 1 into immediate effect. I asked the kids to write a paper briefly describing themselves, telling me everything about themselves that they felt was important, what they liked about themselves and what they didn’t like. This seemed like a fairly reasonable request to me but most of the kids stared at me as if I had ordered them to translate hieroglyphs from a pyramid wall. I repeated the instructions and insisted that they make some attempt to follow them. So they began.

  As I walked around my new fiefdom, the kids earnestly applying themselves to the task at hand, I had my first moment of panic. Some of them could barely write. Half of them were incapable of expressing even the simplest thought on paper. Three quarters of them could barely spell even the most elementary words. Three of them could not write their names. Sweet little Jesus, I thought, as I weaved between the desks, these kids don’t know crap. Most of them hid their papers as I came by, ashamed for me to see they had written nothing. By not being able to tell me anything about themselves, they were telling me everything.

  Next I read them a story, a very simple story, I thought, about a judge and a U.S. marshal in the Wild West. The story contained a murder, a treacherous friend, and a happy ending. I asked the eighth graders and the other kids who appeared the least bit literate to retell the story in their own words on paper. Frank, the eighth grader and the boy Mrs. Brown had introduced as the intellectual torch of the Yamacraw School, wrote the following: “Jim was a ranch. Jim had horse thef. Mike father was short in his back, Mike said Jim had shile his father.” A sixth grader wrote, “There was a cowboy name Jim and Mike had a ranch when Mike father got shoot in his barn. Mike did not no ho shoot him fadher one he fond out h.” This was Cindy Lou, who proudly produced this composition after fifteen minutes of laborious effort.

  Oh, I thought, we have no accomplished essayists in the class, so let us continue into other fields of endeavor. Perhaps some latent Demosthenes was sitting before me awaiting the coming of some twentieth-century Macedonia. I asked each child to tell me about his summer, what he did, what he enjoyed the most, or what he disliked about it. Since there was an obvious dearth of volunteers, I called on a diminutive boy named Saul, a seventh grader who looked no older than six.

  “Tell me about the summer, Saul, me hearty lad,” I said, desperately trying to inject some life in the deadpan atmosphere of the room.

  Saul arose with paramount dignity, tugged on his belt, and spoke with a musical prepubic voice. “I slop de hog. I feed de cow. I feed two dog. I go to Savannah on the boat.”

  The next orator arose and said, “I slop de hog. I feed de cow. I feed three dog. I feed two cat. I go to Savannah in the boat.”

  The next brilliant innovator arose and said, quite surprisingly, “I feed the hog. I feed the cow. I feed the horse. I feed seven dogs. I go to Savannah in the boat.”

  Every other child in the class stood up and without a trace of expression or self-consciousness repeated Saul’s original speech verbatim. A boy named Prophet gave the only vari
ation of the theme when he confided to the class with a grin that “1 help poppa fick the poppa hog.” The class roared.

  After this failure to learn something about each of my new students, I pulled an old trick of the trade out of the hat, one of those tricks you find in a box in the middle of an elementary teacher’s magazine under the heading What to Do on That First Day. A girl I had been dating in Beaufort, herself an elementary teacher, suggested this to me. She promised that the kids would enjoy it and that I would find it extremely informative. I told the class to draw a portrait of me. They looked at me incredulously, jaws agape, as if I had asked them to draw a picture of horse genitals.

  “No lip, gang. No questions. Just draw a picture of this handsome devil you see before you.”

  “Humph, Conrack think he look good,” someone whispered.

  “Conrack don’t think he look good, honey,” I shouted. “Conrack know he look good. Now you just draw how good he looks.”

  “Conrack look bad,” one of the twins whispered.

  “Hey, twin. Conrack has big fist which says he looks good. Otherwise, fist crumples into little jaw of little twin and makes blood come out of face,” I said menacingly, as I put my clenched fist up against his face.

  “Conrack still look bad,” the other twin said, halfway across the room.

  “Good, then make me look bad.”

  Everyone then became serious about art. Oscar, a seventh grader and the biggest boy in the class, gazed at my face with the intensity of a Parisian artist studying the contours of a nude. They all scratched and erased, hooted and squealed, and imprinted my image on their lined pieces of notebook paper. My pug nose caught hell. So did my sideburns. One girl, Ethel, was really very good. As I pinned them up on the bulletin board, I couldn’t help but notice there was some correlation between those who could not draw and those who could not write.